Online June Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

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Disability theology has long addressed the theological and social implications of disability, yet disabled perspectives often remain secondary to nondisabled analyses. This paper reclaims the disabled body as a privileged site of divine revelation, drawing from M. Shawn Copeland’s liberative framework in Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Copeland argues that bodies provoke theology, contesting its hypotheses and resisting its margins. Expanding this methodology, I center the disabled woman’s experience as a locus theologicus, revealing how the disabled body unsettles ableist theological constructs and redefines spirituality through survival, resistance, and flourishing. This paper ultimately argues that disability theology must center disabled voices, not merely for inclusion but for liberation—freedom from societal and theological frameworks that diminish disabled personhood. By foregrounding embodied disabled experience, this work deepens theological anthropology, challenges systemic ableism, and affirms disability as a revelatory source of divine presence.

Speaking from my own experience with OCD, I will describe in this paper the phenomenon of the obsessive intrusive thought as the OCD sufferer experiences it. I will also propose a recovery of the ancient monastic practice of “dispassion” as a manner of responding to intrusive thoughts without obsession, that is, as a way of relating to the thoughts less neurotically and with greater psychical freedom. It is precisely this relationship between thoughts and passions that Rowan Williams so helpfully describes in various places in his body of writings, influenced as he is by the ancient Christian monastic tradition. I will turn, therefore, to Williams and to one of his beloved ancient monks, Maximus the Confessor, to try to untangle the complex relationship between thoughts and passions which is operative within OCD and to present dispassion as a form of psycho-spiritual healing for the OCD sufferer. 

This paper will examine the abundant depictions of dwarf figures, or little persons, from early Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions to argue that the predominance of these depictions may imply that dwarfism was treated as distinct from other physical disorders. To this end, it will use textual and visual sources from c. 1st-5th centuries CE spanning across the northern half of the Indian subcontinent. While texts like the Sanskrit Manusmṛti and the Pali Vinaya include dwarfism as one of the ‘non-ideal’ or ‘disabling’ conditions, visual depictions of religious dwarf figures often portray them as other ‘ideal’ figures – a contradiction that can be found in both textual and visual portrayals. These portrayals highlight two related narratives. Firstly, even though dwarf bodies are considered ‘disordered,’ whether they are ‘disabled’ depends on their socio-religious context. Secondly, the abundance of both ideal and non-ideal dwarf depictions indicates their ‘special’ position among other physically disordered bodies.

The Christchurch Mosque attacks in 2019 shocked New Zealand out of its sense of safe isolation. While New Zealand Christians would rightly distance themselves from this act of terrorism, the 2022 Parliament Grounds occupation in response to Government Covid-19 vaccine mandates was strongly supported by many Christian leaders. This dispute ended with a violent confrontation between protestors and police. Is there a rise in radicalisation towards extremist activity happening in New Zealand? This research uses Reflexive Thematic Analysis to investigate the rhetoric of Brian Tamaki and Peter Mortlock, two of the most vocal church leaders against the New Zealand Government over this time. The themes are discussed using a multidimensional model examining their theological, ritual, social and political aspects. Issues including conspiracy theorism, the Overton Window, Accelerationism and Stochastic Terrorism are discussed. Recommendations for Christian leaders to mitigate against potential radicalisation are presented.

Responding to perspectives on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as merely ‘glancing’ at its revolutionary backdrop, my paper will illustrate a more explicitly reimagined political landscape, labeled under ‘nihilism’ and the development of revolutionary terrorism. I focus on the characterization of the ‘Gentleman Devil’ in Book XI and present a reading through the evolving social profile of the nihilist revolutionary and the “gentleman” terrorist. The Brothers Karamazov’s “religious drama” frames the revolutionary movement as a national identity crisis, of which the Devil is central to understanding Dostoevsky’s portrayed consequences of the alienation of the (Russian) self. Underscoring the increasing presence of the Devil across Dostoevsky’s fiction of the 1870s, I seek to demonstrate how Dostoevsky’s portrayals of the Devil signal his own religious concerns and those of his time, found in responses to the revolutionary movement and its strands of terrorism that culminated in Alexander II’s assassination.

Christian ministries in the United States and the Western Church have not yet put teens in the driver’s seat regarding self-directed spirituality. Despite affirming youth leadership, renewalist ministries (ie, ministries that the Charismatic Renewal Movement has influenced) have often commodified spirituality in children, teens, or young adults. Within U.S. ministry contexts, few age-appropriate resources exist to support Gen Z and Alpha's growing interest in spirituality. Age segregation has limited teens' participation in intergenerational conversations about encountering God, navigating cultural pluralism, and Christian spiritual formation. Without sufficient modeling and protection, teens have lacked opportunities to form identities based on their experiences and steward their unique gifts within community. 

This research examines the conclusions teens at Mosaic Community Church drew about their own spirituality by analyzing adult community members' testimonies. Furthermore, it suggests a methodology to increase teens' agency in maneuvering spiritual narratives. 

This paper explores how the serialized novel The Gold Thread by Norman MacLeod portrays children as mutual liberators of each other, and attends to the role it played in the social movement which led to the abolition of child labor in 19th century Scotland. In stark contrast to the highly moralized children's literature of Victorian Britain aimed at the middle class, in The Gold Thread Norman MacLeod uses literary form to create a story affirming the spiritual capacity and moral agency of children as mutual liberators of each other. This affirmation of the spiritual agency of children can be traced in MacLeod's radical publication Good Words for the Young, a periodical created for working class children. This paper offers insights both into the role that literature played in the advancement of the rights of working-class children in Scotland, as well as reflections on how MacLeod’s approach could act as a model for contemporary accounts of the significance of children’s spiritual lives and their status as persons with spiritual capacity and agency for mutual liberation.

This paper traces disability, religion, and animality through the category of the “runt” in twentieth-century America. It argues that the US government saw the racialized category of “superstition” as inherently debilitating for white children, and that such superstition rendered white children incapable of possessing the laboring body necessary for industrializing the rural South and Appalachia. Zoologists likened “white trash” children to the “runt of the litter” in pigs and theorized that their runtiness came from contact with Black religion: conjure and hoodoo disabled white child by giving them hookworm. Thankfully, runts could be rendered productive if treated like sickly animals. To shift from sickly animals to able-bodied children, though, required religion. Narrating the state’s medical zoology around children unearths new histories of religion and disability, particularly how the state came to sacrifice many actual children at the altar of the potential economic gains imagined in the futurity of the child.